General Assembly. But the life of the party when he
was present was always pure and noble and pious, even if it was sometimes
somewhat hilarious and boisterous. 'If a man's melancholy temperament is
sanctified,' says Rutherford in his _Covenant of Grace_, 'it becomes to
him a seat of sound mortification and of humble walking.' And that was
the happy result of all William Guthrie's melancholy; it was always
alleviated and relieved by great outbursts of good-humour; but both his
melancholy and his hilarity always ended in a humbler walk. Samuel
Rutherford confides in a letter to his old friend, Alexander Gordon, that
he knows a man who sometimes wonders to see any one laugh or sport in
this so sinful and sad life. But that was because he had embittered the
springs of laughter in himself by the wormwood sins of his youth. William
Guthrie had no such remorseful memories continually taking him by the
throat as his divinity professor had, and thus it was that with all his
melancholy he was known as the greatest humorist and the greatest
sportsman in the Scottish Kirk of his day. No doubt he sometimes felt
and confessed that his love of fun and frolic was a temptation that he
had to watch well against. In his _Saving Interest_ he speaks of some
sins that are wrought up into a man's natural humour and constitution,
and are thus as a right hand and a right eye to him. 'My merriment!' he
confessed to one who had rebuked him for it, 'I know all you would say,
and my merriment costs me many a salt tear in secret.' At the same time
this was often remarked with wonder in Guthrie, that however boisterous
his fun was, in one moment he could turn from it to the most serious
things. 'It was often observed,' says Wodrow, 'that, let Mr. Guthrie be
never so merry, he was presently in a frame for the most spiritual duty,
and the only account I can give of it,' says wise Wodrow, 'is, that he
acted from spiritual principles in all he did, and even in his
relaxations.' Poor Guthrie had a terrible malady that preyed on his most
vital part continually--a malady that at last carried him off in the mid-
time of his days, and, like Solomon in the proverb, he took to a merry
heart as an alleviating medicine.

Like our own Thomas Guthrie, too, William Guthrie was a great angler. He
could gaff out a salmon in as few minutes as the deftest-handed
gamekeeper in all the country, and he could stalk down a deer in as few
hours as my lord himself